All posts tagged Version 3.0

About five years ago, Chay Yew, a playwright and the artistic director of the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, was approached by schools for copies of Asian American plays that could be taught and performed. Except Yew couldn’t find a recent compilation of Asian American plays. So when Theatre Communications Group approached him about editing a new anthology, he agreed, and the result is “Version 3.0,” released by TCG yesterday.

“What was important was to platform the third wave of Asian American playwrights that had come out of a long tradition,” Yew told Speakeasy. “These were writers that had different voices and different perspectives on what it is to be American and Asian.”

Yew asked renowned playwright David Henry Hwang, author of “M. Butterfly,” “Yellow Face,” and “Chinglish,” to write the foreword. Yew recalled first meeting Hwang in 1991, after a talk Hwang gave at Brandeis University. At the time, Yew had been writing small plays that were Caucasian-centric, he said, but after listening to Hwang and watching “M. Butterfly,” he began to reconsider his own work in the context of being an Asian American.

Speakeasy caught up with Yew and Hwang by phone recently. Read the interview after the jump. Read More »

Two weeks ago, actress and singer Patti LuPone grabbed a cell phone out of the hand of an audience member who was texting during a performance of her current play, "Shows for Days." The bold move led to an outpouring of support from fans fed up with glowing screens. Ms. LuPone gives us her five rules of theater etiquette.